By Joy Pullmann
Friday, September 08, 2017
Betsy DeVos’s tenure as U.S. education secretary, like
Trump’s arrival in the White House, has occasioned existential panic among the
Left. It’s a bit confusing, as she hasn’t done anything yet but visit schools
and convene meetings, and her policy positions are decidedly mainstream, both
among Republicans and the general public. Like DeVos, majorities of Americans
think private schools provide a better education than do public schools, and
support school choice in various forms.
Although their personalities couldn’t be more different,
both DeVos and Trump seem to embody a sort of Rorschach blot signifying doom to
the Left. There’s some legitimacy to this panic. As leader of a colossal
failure of a federal bureaucracy (which is saying a lot), DeVos can do little
to benefit Americans besides dismantle her own department. Yet while just about
any real accomplishment is unlikely during her tenure, given the Republican
Congress’s refusal to make the hard choices required of governing, DeVos
frightens the heebiejeebies out of the Left because her marquee policy—school
choice—uncovers their intellectual and moral bankruptcy.
Just about every week, one can find prominent outlets
attacking DeVos and school choice. This week it’s at least The Atlantic, The New York Times, and NPR’s “This
American Life.” The DeVos family has bankrolled charter-school initiatives and
school-voucher advocacy organizations, so these articles invariably tie Mrs.
DeVos to the outcomes of policies with those labels. That would sound
reasonable except she’s never created a law or regulation, since she never held
public office before this year. Holding DeVos responsible for “school choice”
is like blaming a pizza fan for a pizza for which he has created neither the
recipe nor the actual pie.
Just like public schools, “school choice” is not created
equal. The same conditions and mentality choking the life out of U.S. public
schools also has a grip on all the “school choice” programs in existence, since
for some reason the people who have zero track record of producing excellence
in any system of education are typically given power to regulate school
“choice” programs. Then people who subordinate facts to ideology write feature
articles or prognosticate about the outcomes in major American media.
Blame Betsy DeVos,
Not Failed Public Education?
The NYT article
poses as a deep dive into education in Michigan, DeVos’s home state, which it
laughably calls an “unregulated” “Wild West” for charter schools—public schools
run by universities, nonprofits, companies, and even traditional school
districts. In Michigan’s “Wild West,” people who want to open a charter school
must comply with thousands of pages
of state, local, and federal regulations, largely the same as those for
traditional public schools, concerning teacher credentials, building codes,
special-needs students, curriculum, testing, transparency, budgeting and
finance, and more, all with approximately a third less funding compared to the
state’s traditional public schools. That may be crazy, but it ain’t for the
reasons Mr. New York Times thinks.
The NYT article
also cites a 2016 Education Trust-Midwest report that misinterprets another
study it cites to claim that “70 percent of Michigan charters were in the
bottom half of the state’s rankings.” Yes, if you don’t adjust the data to
account for the fact that charter schools tend to serve poor and minority
students. When
researchers factored in socioeconomic data to compare apples and apples, as
they say, “82 percent of Michigan charters created higher than average growth
in reading, and 72 percent had higher growth in math” and “almost all charter
schools in Michigan are doing about the same or better than their conventional
school counterparts.” Unlike those cited in this article, the most reliable
studies, those based on random assignment, do
indeed find that comparable charter-school students learn more than their
traditional-public counterparts, and typically at substantially less cost to
taxpayers.
The article also misleads readers by citing
dismal-sounding data about state public school performance. But only about one in ten of Michigan public schools are charter schools. Does it make
sense to blame 10 percent of an ecosystem for 100 percent of its problems,
especially when research shows the 10 percent is at least comparable to the
other 90?
Not to mention the head-slapping insanity of
simultaneously noting that Michigan children sit in classrooms with leaky roofs
on streets bereft of streetlights because their public education system,
particularly in the neediest school districts, is bankrupt due to decades of
gross internal mismanagement. Taxes from decades past and decades in the future has been spent by a cabal of feckless
politicians and greedy system profiteers. And we’re supposed to be inherently
suspicious about charter management companies because government always good,
business always bad? Teachers unions and corrupt officials looted Michigan’s
public schools, and the answer is to write that failed system a bigger check?
This is where we get to the intellectual and moral
bankruptcy of self-styled “public education advocates.”
The Individual
Versus the Collective
We see more of that bankruptcy inside the much kinder
“This American Life” profile of DeVos. Remarkably, the show seems to have found
no one able to say anything personally disparaging about DeVos, besides that
the billionaire owns fancy cars she worried about parking in a wrong-tracks
neighborhood when she volunteered for five years at a public school. It gives ample
time to a 17-year-old young woman DeVos has mentored since finding her inside
Burton Elementary School in first grade, helping pay Angie’s way to a better
private school, then ultimately hiring Angie and her mother, Wanda, who has a
health condition that makes nonflexible work hours difficult.
It is evident that DeVos was careful to give without
smothering—she doesn’t pay all Angie’s tuition so that her mother contributes
also through work, which maintains their dignity and self-determination.
Speaking in Spanish with Angie translating, Wanda expresses only deep
gratitude, and unreservedly, after allowing Angie to be interviewed privately
to speak freely. DeVos comes off looking good, and not through a prepackaged PR
specialist, which makes the reporting that much more poignant—especially for a
figure who has been so publicly vilified with so little substance to sustain
it.
“This American Life” cites, without attribution, the
statistic about charters performing in the bottom half of Michigan’s schools that
doesn’t account for socioeconomic background, and claims school funding has
declined when, inflation-adjusted per-student spending actually increased 5
percent since 1992. The show also hammers at school choice, saying that DeVos
helped Angie, and another mentee for whom DeVos also eventually paid private
tuition, but not their public school overall. The show frames school choice as
a dichotomy between allowing individuals to meet their own needs at the expense
of the community’s well-being:
[‘This American Life’ producer
Susan Burton, narrating:] When a child leaves a school, the school loses the
funding for that child. School choice advocates say this encourages competition
and innovation. Schools have to compete to attract children and the dollars
that go with them. It’s the free market applied to education.
What makes this complicated is that
this money pays not just for that individual child, but for salaries and
programs and infrastructure, for all the costs of keeping the school open. Losing
that money has ripple effects, and at Burton Elementary…it did not go over well
with everyone.
[Burton Elementary Teacher:] It’s
super insulting — it’s like all you do, all the hard work you put in is not
good enough for me or people I know in general. I find it rather ironic that
[DeVos] would tutor a student and then take her out of the school that she was
working in. I thought she wanted to make the school better. She could have used
her power way differently.
[Burton:] Instead of helping fix
the school, Betsy DeVos paid to place the child elsewhere. That was her
solution. It was like vouchers for one.
The show then quotes two other folks who, despite
charitably attributing good motives to DeVos, think her way of running
education pits individuals against the collective. Therein lies another
bankruptcy of school choice critics: viewing social goods as zero-sum rather
than seeking or even acknowledging the potential for a win-win, and implictly
relying upon coercion to force their vision of the good life upon all people
they can manage to sweep into their power.
From Zero-Sum to
Win-Win
Of course there are situations in which what is good for
an individual is not good for his community. Take, for example, the “brain
drain” U.S. universities have perpetrated on rural and other culturally
pillaged areas, or that our high-skill immigration visas may perpetrate
globally. It is entirely fair to discuss tensions between individual
opportunity and one’s duty to to give back to one’s family and community of
origin.
But we have to do so accurately, and in context. The
truth is that conventional American public schooling, because it is based on
one’s home purchasing power, is an inadvertent but real tool of racial and
economic segregation. Because of this, high-quality research finds that school
vouchers have de-segregating
aggregate effects, by equalizing families’ purchasing power.
High-quality research finds that voucher programs improve
the performance of nearby public
schools. Research also finds charter schools reduce the premiums built into
home mortgages in school districts, thereby reducing a deflationary effect on
the wealth of the poor. The best and most reliable studies find school choice
increases student learning while dramatically reducing spending, both for students who exercise choice and
those who don’t, as well as for nearby property owners. School choice even
has been found to reduce crime!
These are win-win outcomes, and they are well-established
by practical experience and reliable research. The research to the contrary is
not as reliable as the research in favor. One would think just about any
fair-minded person would welcome learning of them, and after a review of the
facts would favor implementing them. So why is school choice, and its avatar in
little Midwestern-nice Betsy DeVos, so existentially terrifying to the Left?
The Failure of
U.S. Public Schools Is a Failure of the Left
Of course there are many factors, but at root it’s
because school choice, and the problems it aims to address, put in stark relief
the outcomes of the Left’s core conceits about freedom, equality, and the
common good, and their choice to prioritize the collective above the
individual. U.S. education is in more advanced stages of the bureaucratic
technocracy progressives believe is the right way to run society—by coalitions
of centralized, largely unelected, supposedly apolitical “experts.” It
epitomizes what happens when we force people to sacrifice their personal vision
of the good life to public negotiation, displace families and the private
sector as the real engines of our civic and economic life in favor of
unaccountable, quasi-political bodies, and stifle freedom of association in the
name of equality.
What happens? To put it bluntly, the worst-case scenario
is Detroit. Or East Germany (and if you check the data about Detroit’s
education conditions you would agree that East Germany is not too wild a
comparison). The quality of children’s education is determined by their
family’s social and economic capital. Prices keep increasing, while quality
keeps declining. Dissatisfaction is high among both consumers and providers.
School districts and other education bodies are captured by myriad special
interests because they have the strongest incentives to persist over time, and
if they capture the one power center they win all its domain. This makes a
system more susceptible to corruption than it would be if power were more
widely held rather than concentrated.
These are the natural outcomes of the Left’s philosophy.
They can’t face them, or they’d cease being the Left. The presence of Betsy
DeVos and all she stands for makes the massive dissonance between their goals
and outcomes all the more apparent, and it’s horribly painful. She takes the
pretty mask off their ideology’s ugliness.
The mantras of collectivization sound good. “Good schools
for all.” The problem is that when we focus on the collective, the individuals
who make up that collective are more prone to get lost. As Dash observes in
“The Incredibles” when his mom tells him “Everyone’s special, Dash”: “Which is
another way of saying no one is.”
We don’t need everyone to be special to everyone to get
good education or good neighborhoods. We just need everyone to be loved by someone. Statistically and naturally
speaking, that someone is most likely to be a child’s mother or father. While
not all parents are perfect, giving parents in general the capacity to wield
genuine power over their own children will create far better outcomes than any
other social arrangement. This is what real school choice is about. And its
lack is why American education is so dysfunctional.
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